The Biggest Secret
by Mario Quade
Summary: Hermione gets introduced to the biggest secret on Earth.


**I recently rewatched the original Men in Black and then watched the, well, let's say disappointing new one. And I somehow thought of this crossover. This is a one shot. Hope you like it.**

* * *

Hermione Granger stood in her new office, a glow on her face. She had just been inducted as the new Minister of Magic for the UK and Ireland. It was an important position, one of the most important in the entire magical world. Due to historical events, especially within the more recent past, Britain had become a central focus of magical history once more.

The election had been relatively easy. Hermione could still draw a lot of support from being a war hero. Her friendship with Harry Potter and her work as the head of the Departments for Magical Creatures and Law Enforcement had gotten her the reputation of a politician who got things done. Her opponent was a relative nobody. He had been a few years ahead of her in Hogwarts. Her brother-in-law Percy had warned her to not take him lightly since Devon had a lot of supporters within the old ranks in the Ministry, but in the end Hermione got the position. The public support had been enough to break through the wall within the very Ministry she was now heading.

During her time at the Ministry she had already got a lot of laws on the way that lead to a lot of changes, especially in the relationship between humans and magical creatures. But now she was going to tackle her most important and difficult act – the way the Minister was elected and how his, or her, power was regulated. Once the Minister was appointed he, or she, had way too much power in Hermione's mind and after Voldemort had taken over about twenty years ago, a lot of people had started to think the same way. But Kingsley Shacklebolt had restored their trust into the office and thusly a lot had forgotten about how dangerous this amount of power was in the hand of just one person. Hermione hadn't though.

Suddenly there was a knock at the door. Hermione opened it and let her predecessor enter. Thadeaus Hewitt was a middle aged man with fading brown hair and dull grey eyes. Both his appearance and his personality where one that just wasn't noteworthy at all. He had only lasted three years in office.

"Mrs. Granger," he said as he entered.

"Is it time already to visit the Muggle Prime Minister," Hermione asked surprised.

Hewitt laughed. "No, not yet. There's a, ahm, way more important meeting we've to go to before that," he said and then gestured to the fireplace in the office. "The address is Savile Road 36," he said.

Hermione nodded slowly and stepped into the fire, using floo powder, not knowing where she was going exactly. After falling through a floo network, an unpleasant experience to say the least, she stepped out in what appeared to be an old typewriter shop. "The new one," asked an old man with white hair who was standing behind the counter. He barely looked up as he continued to tinker with one of the typewriters.

Before Hermione could answer the flames burst green again and Hewitt stepped out. "Good day, sir," he said to the man behind the counter, who nodded in response.

Hewitt lead Hermione to a row of shelves in the back of the shop. He then looked at the typewriters as if he was searching for one in particular. Hermione was about to ask him what was going on when he found the one he had been looking for. He typed in a code (RYGLHW890739) and a small door leading to the what probably was the storing area opened. "After you," he said again and Hermione stepped through the door.

To her surprise it didn't lead to a room but into an elevator instead. "Where the hell are we going," she asked.

"You'll see," said Hewitt and the elevator started to decent.

Less than a minute later it stopped and opened again to a corridor that looked like it belonged into an old but stylish business building or hotel, not in the basement of an old typewriter shop. At the entrance of the elevator stood a man. He was older, his hair was grey but there were still traces of brown left in it. The lines of his face and his tired green-grey eyes told Hermione that he had lived a stress filled life. And just as the location of the corridor, the man also seemed out of place. Not in the corridor, his black business suit with matching tie and white shirt made him fit perfectly there, but he was just as out of place in the basement of the typewriter shop.

"Mrs. Granger, Mr. Hewitt," said the man with an American accent.

"K," replied Hewitt stifly and with a lot of respect in his voice.

The man nodded stiffly and then gestured for them to follow him. "You probably are already asking yourself what you're doing here, Minister Granger."

"I do, yes."

"Very well then. When Tom Riddle first rose to power he attracted the attention not just of the Wizarding World but also Muggle intelligence agencies. While your government did a good enough job hiding your existence from the general public, even keeping detailed information out of the hand of most of these agencies, they hadn't so much luck with us."

"Who is us," asked Hermione, being completely at unease.

"I'll get to that," replied the man who Hewitt had simply called K. "Since nobody knew about us, there was no way for your people to find us and put their usual security measurements in place to keep us oblivious to your existence. So, we continued to keep an eye on you. And when Riddle rose again, we tried our best to cover it up while your government was asleep at the wheel."

"Why would you do that," asked Hermione.

"Because if people were to find out that the supernatural world exists, they'd freak. Mass panic. It is our job to prevent such a thing from happening," explained K and opened the door to an office, which Hermione assumed must have been his.

It was relatively large, for some reason it had windows on either side that were covered. There were book cases on the other two sides, one each next to the door and a larger one on the opposite wall. Above that one hung two pictures. Each one showed two men dressed in black business suits with big guns fighting some form of monster. In the middle stood a large desk and K sat down behind it, gesturing to his two guest to take a seat in front of it.

"Once Mr. Potter had gotten rid of Riddle, we exposed ourself to Mr. Shacklebolt and offered our help in cleaning up the mess the second war had left you people in. He didn't really have much of a choice than to accept our help, especially not after he learned who we are and what we're capable of."

Hermione frowned. How had she never heard of this? "And who are you," she asked.

K smirked and handed her a folder. "After the UFO scare in Roswell, the US government decided to start a small, underfunded agency inside the State Department with the laughable purpose to make contact with extraterrestrial life. The agency was seen as a joke by everyone except the small group who made contact just outside New York on March 2, 1961," he told her.

Hermione didn't believe him and opened the folder. Inside of it were government documents, US government documents, clearly dated in the 1950s, and pictures of a group of men, most of them wearing black, encountering tall beings with long necks that didn't look like anything Hermione had ever seen before.

"There were nine of us the first night: seven agents, one astronomer, and one dumb kid who got lost on the wrong back road," K added while Hermione looked at the pictured dumb folded. "They were a group of intergalactic refugees. Wanted to use the earth as an apolitical zone for creatures without a planet. Refugees, migrants, you probably know the drill. Kinda like the movie Casablanca, only without Nazis."

Hermione looked at K with an empty expression on her face. She simply blinked. It wasn't often the case that she couldn't find the right words or any words to reply to something but this was one of these situations. This had to be a joke.

"We agreed, and we concealed all the evidence of their landing. For that we used the Wold's Fair in Queens."

"So these are real flying saucers," Hermione asked in disbelief as she looked onto the pictures showing two flying saucers on top of two polls, standing in Queen.

K nodded. "Used to be anyway. The two originals were destroyed about twenty-two years ago," he said, nodding to one of the pictures at the wall. It hung to right when you entered and it showed to men dressed in black fighting a giant bug or cockroach. "One of the men is me, the other one is my former partner J. Was his first mission. This bug tried to steal one of the saucers to flee earth. It's a long story. We destroyed them and replaced them with fakes."

Hermione nodded slowly, still not knowing what to make out of this. "So you hide aliens here on earth," she asked.

K nodded. "Yes. Right now there are about 20,000 aliens on this planet, about half of them living here on a permanent basis, most on the island of Manhattan. There are only a few hundred living outside the United States, at least legally. The majority of them in the UK. That's why we have our biggest field office here."

"And you control them," Hermione asked.

"Basically. We make sure that human authority don't find out about them and that they follow the treaties earth has with other species," K said and handed her a par of sunglasses. "Put this one on."

It sounded like an order to Hermione and she didn't like that. K himself got out a pair of sunglasses and put them on as well.

"Please, do you have to," asked Hewitt in a pleading voice.

"Company policy," replied K coldly. "Please, Minister, put them on."

"No," replied Hermione. K shrugged and got out a metal tube that slid open, revealing a section of blue coloured glass. Suddenly a bright light lit the room and Hermione sat the frozen. She blinked and then said. "Wasn't I just standing – "

"At the door," finished K and pressed a button. A screen appeared on his desk and played their previous conversation.

"What just happened," asked Hermione in shock.

"I neuralised you. I knew you wouldn't put these on," K explained.

Hermione realised that it had been a display of power. They could, at least rudimentary, delete someone's memories. Wizards were better at this, of course, but if they could do this it was no wonder that nobody knew they existed. Or that Shacklebolt agreed to let them help him. If he hadn't, they'd simply deleted his memory and nothing would have happened.

Suddenly two other men, also dressed in black business suits, entered the room. "You know what to do," K told them.

"No, I don't want to," protested Hewitt and made a move to get out his wand but both of them had already futuristic looking guns in their hands.

"Please, Mr. Hewitt, don't make this harder on yourself. You know the drill," said K coolly and ordered his two agents to grab Hewitt and get him out of his office with an simple head movement.

Once Hewitt was gone, Hermione asked K what was going to happen to him. "We'll rewrite his memory. It's not that easy to isolate the memories including us and replacing them, but you probably already know that."

"You can do that," asked Hermione in shock.

K smirked. "This is a standard neuroliser," said K and got the metal shaft back out. "It's very good at deleting memories, it can wipe out decades of them. But it's also very rudimentary and you can't really single out one memory that you want to delete while keeping the other ones intact. We've got a bigger, more advanced version in the labs."

Hermione blinked, trying to make sense of what she had just learned. "Why are you deleting his memories of you," she finally asked, already knowing the answer.

"Because he isn't longer Minister. And yes, Shacklebolt and Weasley don't longer have any memories of us either."

"But why," asked Hermione, still not understanding.

K pressed another button on his desk and his windows cleared up, exposing a huge, bright, white room. K's office basically hovered in the middle of it and he had a very good overview over everything that was going on below. Several people in black business suits and even more in simple short-sleeved white button-down shirts with black ties were running around – and between them were dozens of creatures that most definitely weren't from earth.

"Mrs. Granger, welcome to the Men in Black."

* * *

When Hermione got home that evening she knew that she had to keep this secret. The Men in Black were helping the magical community to keep it secret in the digital age and the witches and wizards didn't even know about it. Most never even thought about what a miracle it was that magic hadn't been exposed it. Hermione now knew the truth. And she knew how important it was to keep the MIB secret. K had told her about five different incidents in the last twenty years that earth had nearly been destroyed, and he guaranteed her that there had been even more in which earth had been even closer to the edge of destruction. No, she couldn't tell anyone of this. It was disturbing enough to know the truth, she couldn't trouble anyone else with it.

Ron had of coursed tried to get secrets out of her, but she didn't budge. There were other things that were confidential that she couldn't talk with him about. A lot of issues she could talk with Harry about, since he had the clearance for it. But not about this. Nobody but her had a clearance. Now she knew why Shackleblot wanted out as quickly as possible. Why Percy only finished one term and didn't want to seek a second. Or why Hewitt quit before his was even over. The weight of this secret had been laying on their shoulders and had pressed them down. There was nobody they could have shared their burden with nor was there for Hermione. She had promised herself that she would manage to be a good Minister and to hopefully stay in office a long time. Now, not even twenty-four hours later, she wasn't longer sure that she was able to finish the first five years in office.


End file.
